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Page 35
All art starts from this simplicity; and the higher the art rises,
the greater the simplicity. I have been speaking of the fittings of
a dwelling-house--a place in which we eat and drink, and pass
familiar hours; but when you come to places which people want to
make more specially beautiful because of the solemnity or dignity of
their uses, they will be simpler still, and have little in them save
the bare walls made as beautiful as may be. St. Mark's at Venice
has very little furniture in it, much less than most Roman Catholic
churches: its lovely and stately mother St. Sophia of
Constantinople had less still, even when it was a Christian church:
but we need not go either to Venice or Stamboul to take note of
that: go into one of our own mighty Gothic naves (do any of you
remember the first time you did so?) and note how the huge free
space satisfies and elevates you, even now when window and wall are
stripped of ornament: then think of the meaning of simplicity, and
absence of encumbering gew-gaws.
Now after all, for us who are learning art, it is not far to seek
what is the surest way to further it; that which most breeds art is
art; every piece of work that we do which is well done, is so much
help to the cause; every piece of pretence and half-heartedness is
so much hurt to it. Most of you who take to the practice of art can
find out in no very long time whether you have any gifts for it or
not: if you have not, throw the thing up, or you will have a
wretched time of it yourselves, and will be damaging the cause by
laborious pretence: but if you have gifts of any kind, you are
happy indeed beyond most men; for your pleasure is always with you,
nor can you be intemperate in the enjoyment of it, and as you use
it, it does not lessen, but grows: if you are by chance weary of it
at night, you get up in the morning eager for it; or if perhaps in
the morning it seems folly to you for a while, yet presently, when
your hand has been moving a little in its wonted way, fresh hope has
sprung up beneath it and you are happy again. While others are
getting through the day like plants thrust into the earth, which
cannot turn this way or that but as the wind blows them, you know
what you want, and your will is on the alert to find it, and you,
whatever happens, whether it be joy or grief, are at least alive.
Now when I spoke to you last year, after I had sat down I was half
afraid that I had on some points said too much, that I had spoken
too bitterly in my eagerness; that a rash word might have
discouraged some of you; I was very far from meaning that: what I
wanted to do, what I want to do to-night is to put definitely before
you a cause for which to strive.
That cause is the Democracy of Art, the ennobling of daily and
common work, which will one day put hope and pleasure in the place
of fear and pain, as the forces which move men to labour and keep
the world a-going.
If I have enlisted any one in that cause, rash as my words may have
been, or feeble as they may have been, they have done more good than
harm; nor do I believe that any words of mine can discourage any who
have joined that cause or are ready to do so: their way is too
clear before them for that, and every one of us can help the cause
whether he be great or little.
I know indeed that men, wearied by the pettiness of the details of
the strife, their patience tried by hope deferred, will at whiles,
excusably enough, turn back in their hearts to other days, when if
the issues were not clearer, the means of trying them were simpler;
when, so stirring were the times, one might even have atoned for
many a blunder and backsliding by visibly dying for the cause. To
have breasted the Spanish pikes at Leyden, to have drawn sword with
Oliver: that may well seem to us at times amidst the tangles of to-
day a happy fate: for a man to be able to say, I have lived like a
fool, but now I will cast away fooling for an hour, and die like a
man--there is something in that certainly: and yet 'tis clear that
few men can be so lucky as to die for a cause, without having first
of all lived for it. And as this is the most that can be asked from
the greatest man that follows a cause, so it is the least that can
be taken from the smallest.
So to us who have a Cause at heart, our highest ambition and our
simplest duty are one and the same thing: for the most part we
shall be too busy doing the work that lies ready to our hands, to
let impatience for visibly great progress vex us much; but surely
since we are servants of a Cause, hope must be ever with us, and
sometimes perhaps it will so quicken our vision that it will outrun
the slow lapse of time, and show us the victorious days when
millions of those who now sit in darkness will be enlightened by an
ART MADE BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE, A JOY TO THE MAKER AND
THE USER.
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